Hey all,
Ive been trying to spin up a new system for a few weeks now and im at the end of my rope. Ive tried so many different times to generate a kernel that would boot my system and i havent had any success yet. My latest try was to load off the end of the world dvd, chroot in, and make localmodconfig because i heard that it essentially pipes lsmod into your kernel config, but i still get a panic. Can somebody take a sec to help me?

# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically
# built this stage.
# Please consult /usr/share/portage/config/make.conf.example for a more
# detailed example.
CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j5"
# WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
# Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before changing.
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
# These are the USE flags that were used in addition to what is provided by the
# profile used for building.
#USE="bindist mmx sse sse2"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
DISTDIR="${PORTDIR}/distfiles"
PKGDIR="${PORTDIR}/packages"

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed); notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail / tail freely.
#
# The root filesystem should have a pass number of either 0 or 1.
# All other filesystems should have a pass number of 0 or greater than 1.
#
# See the manpage fstab(5) for more information.
#

that looks like the driver for your 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS 2208 [Thunderbolt] (rev 05).
If so, its a module, so its located in /lib/modules/ which cannot be read until root is mounted. Thats a problem if you need it to read the root filesystem, where /lib/modules is stored.

Code:

CONFIG_ATA=m

so all your SATA and PATA drivers are also modules. Thats game over. your kernel has no way to read any hard drives.
If you want to use modules like this you must provide a initrd that has the modules so that they can be loaded before the HDD con be read.
The alternative is to use